The present availability of small coal fired heating plants in the range of 10,000 BTU per hour to 150,000 BTU per hour of heat is limited. The ones that are available are usually low in efficiency, require indoor locations such as basements, large utility rooms, or are individual room heaters, require chimneys, exhaust dirty air, and require considerable hourly or daily maintenance. Little has been done in the last 30 years to improve on small furnace designs for home use, and small commercial use.
To improve on these above problems would be a coal fired self-contained heating plant that could be easily and economically located for use by existing homes or buildings, would not require hourly maintenance, would exhaust near clean air, and would produce useable heat at a high efficiency rate.
Such a unit could save the consumer near 80 to 90 percent on the BTU's of heat produced, as compared to the heat bought from Electric Utility Companies. For example, each kilowatt-hour of heat (3412 BTU) bought from Electric Utility Companies in the South would range in cost above 0.04 1/2.cent.and up to near 0.10 .cent.in some Northern areas. This same heat cost generated from the above described coal fired heating plant would be approximately 0.01.cent.per kilowatt-hour, thereby showing a savings of near 80 to 90 percent over the heat bought from Electric Utility Companies. Upon realizing this, I started working toward developing such an apparatus in 1981. My first successful burn in a test furnace was in early 1982, when my 3 inch diameter model furnace burned for one hour on 12 ounces of coal, proving that the burn of coal of selected quality could be controlled to produce the desired heat output, even to under 10,000 BTU per hour. After building three different model furnaces and performing numerous coal burn tests, the design of this enclosed apparatus was developed.